About memories and loss
- Archives
- Memory
- Animation
01/Synopsis
A film adaptation of Rafaële Germain’s essay Le présent infini, a small ode to the passage of time and to what we preserve—or neglect.
Capture, document, record, share, and start again. We are making ourselves more memorable than ever by archiving every bit of our daily lives. What if we lost something along the way?
04/Crédits
Amélie Hardy
Rafaële Germain
Isabelle Grignon-Francke
Louis Turcotte
Laura Lemelin-Rainville
Louis Roy
Samuel Carrier
Louis Chevalier-Dagenais
Alexa-Jeanne Dubé, Evelyne Laferrière, Gary Boudreault
Travelling
02/Intentions
Director’s statement
For as long as I can remember, I have always felt the need to archive fragments of my life. As a child, I always had a camera hanging around my neck. As a teenager, video took over. And what about the 1,001 diaries that chronicle every period of my early life in writing? Observing the world around me, capturing it, and the deep desire to resist forgetting and the passage of time… these are concerns that are central to my identity. Rafaële Germain’s essay plunged me into a deep reflection on our relationship with memory, on the need to archive at all costs, and on the fragility of the technologies that quietly stand in for our deepest faculties… I wish to make the author’s words my own in order to create a short work that explores the omnipresence of these archival mediums in our modern lives. Captive in an image-driven society, our lives and memories are now recorded, archived, filmed, photographed, monitored, and accessible at any moment. A vast all-you-can-eat buffet where we make sure that nothing can be lost to oblivion, and where our intimacy increasingly seems to become public property. I wish to explore our relationship with this infinite memory through a playful and free-spirited cinema, imbued with a certain nostalgia for a time when we were perhaps a little freer.
03/Media
Talking about us
“Amélie Hardy offers a condensed reflection that is both delightful and unsettling on the permanence of the traces of our existence that we leave behind. From primal memory to videos shared on the web, the short film covers a wide spectrum, fortunately organizing its content into five parts. Despite the multiple visual sources juxtaposed in Louis Chevalier-Dagenais’ dynamic editing, the narrative stays on course, ensuring cohesion throughout.”
“[In] Notes on Memory and Forgetting (2022), where the contemporary world is observed with epigrammatic humor and a touch of unmistakable academic flair.”
“Really enjoyed this. I think these are very interesting reflections that resonate with me a lot, since I struggle greatly to let go of the past and the memories that surround it. It’s definitely worth watching.”